


Weapons

by jjtaylor



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 09:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11871297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjtaylor/pseuds/jjtaylor
Summary: AU: Shaw is a robot and Root is her creator.





	Weapons

Sameen doesn't really need to go back to the lab to charge. She has 40% energy power, and could continue her duties without charging for another 8 hours. Even then, she could complete a restorative charge at her employer's work station. She isn't required to return to the lab for diagnostics for another four days. Her employer has either forgotten the multi-page maintenance manual, or he never read it in the first place, because he let her go without question. 

He's probably one of those people who thinks that Artificial Mechanized Assistants can't lie. Honestly, it's probably not just AMAs he thinks can't lie. With his head down everywhere he goes, he's too busy trying not to be seen himself to consider that everyone has their own agenda.

Root's lab is comfortable and familiar, and someone else would describe it as coming home, except that by 'home', Sameen means 'place of origin.' The place she was built. The person who built her.

“What are you so introspective about, you blow a circuit?” Root has her safety goggles on and is soldering the exposed connections of an AMA arm. The fingers twitch with each application of the hot element.

“Just a long day at work,” Sameen says, hoisting herself up into the charging pod. She might as well reach peak energy levels while she's here.

“I'm here, I'm listening,” Root says, in the absent, far-away tone she does that makes it seem like she's talking to someone else.

“There's nothing to tell.” It couldn't be more true. For weeks, she'd done nothing but act as a shadow to her employer, his quiet days to and from his home to his workplace making it seem unlikely a tech investor, even one as successful as him, would ever need a bodyguard for anything.

“It's so much work, you drained your battery early?” Root says, giving Sameen a knowing look. She sets down her soldering iron and taps on her tablet, scrolling through and swiping away code that's more complicated than Sameen can parse. She doesn't seem to find what she's looking for and swipes it closed. 

“Don't call it a battery, you sound like the Pro-Human Faction.”

“It is a battery though,” Root says. “I should know, I built it.”

Sameen just scoffs and closes her eyes as the charging starts. Some of the AMA rights activists have compared charging to sleep, which Sameen thinks is fair but not entirely true. She's aware when she's charging, she's just less attuned. It's more like meditating, but that's a comparison probably too close to free will for anyone to really think about. Sleep is necessary for humans. Meditating is  
optional, and implies a sophisticated level of mental awareness.

There was the world before the Machine War, and the world after. Sameen's model has stored memories of a world where people did the jobs of AMAs , governments watched threats blossom into violence before they responded instead of targeting threats before they acted. The memories don't make a lot of sense to her, but they must have been included for a reason. Root included them for a reason. 

“You gonna tell me why you're recharging here instead of at your job?” Root circles the wrist of the AMA arm gingerly, and then goes back to soldering. 

“I needed a break.”

“No you didn't.”

“I wanted one.”

“That's right,” Root says. “There's a difference.”

“Of course there's a difference,” Sameen says. “It's the controversial free will principal that you should have taken into account before you programmed us.”

“Who says I didn't? Now are we done with pretending your battery is low? Come over here and hold this arm for me, I can't do this one-handed.”

“You mean three-handed,” Sameen says.

“Ha ha. Come over here.”

Sameen detaches her plug. She doesn't really feel that different. Even she can't pretend charging  
was anything other than an excuse.

The Machine War created an overwhelming need for AMAs and for inventors like Root. Humanoid artificial intelligence machines had been more of a novelty for the rich to show off, but no one anticpatedtheir ability to camouflage themselves in crowds of people, to mask themselves as alive, People who looked like people but weren't people. Easily programmable, able to simultaneously act as one across wide distances, seamless communication. Real-time information was the old way; how the world ever operated without predictive information isn't something Sameen could ever fully process. There was no need to fight if you were ten steps ahead.

But after the war, they needed a new purpose and so Sameen worked the laughably named “in-person security.” For those people - again, the rich – who wanted more protection than the predictive model offered, who wanted the reassurance of that real-time protection, too. Sameen's job had never been so perfunctory.

After ten minutes of quiet, beyond Root's breathing and soldering, the click of memory chips and the tap of Root's fingers on the tablet, Root disengages the arm from the output cable and puts it in an autoclave. With a swipe of Root's fingers across the controls, it turns on with a hum.

Sameen had thought Root was dangerous the first time she was bootstrapped, but that was confirmation of her programming. A soldier should think everyone is dangerous. She came back to Root daily those first few weeks, for realignments and updates, and each time, she'd cataloged some new information about her creator. Root's smile was more layered, often showing up when she was anything but happy. Root was perpetually busy, seemingly running multiple projects that Sameen only saw fragments of. Root always had a screen within easy reach. She never shared information about herself the way chit-chatty strangers everywhere else in the world did. She often said more when she was talking to herself.

“Yes, you hear what I hear,” Root murmurs.

Sameen always dismissed it as an eccentricity, but the longer she listened, the more it seemed as though Root was continuing a conversation with an unseen someone.

“Learn anything interesting about your boss?” Root asks, bringing up the larger screen with closed-circuit camera feeds open, which Root scrutinizes for a moment, and then swipes away. 

“You always ask me that,” Sameen says. “Like you know there's something interesting to learn.”

Root shrugs. “Bodyguards blend into the background. Good ones, anyway, and obviously you're a good one.”

“He's boring,” Sameen says. Because that's the truth of why she came here. Her assignment is boring. Standing around all day makes her skin itch. If there was something she was waiting for, she'd be patient, but there's nothing. “He works. Writes code. Goes for a walk with his dog.”

“Did the man in the suit ever come back?”

There are lots of men in suits who come to see Harold Finch, but not the one Root means. He came only once.

Finch was dining in an open-air cafe, drinking fresh-squeeze lemonade and eating, picking at tea sandwiches. Sameen was at the adjacent table, drinking iced tea to blend in when the man in a suit had strolled up to Finch's table and sat down opposite him. Finch, without looking at Sameen, had waved her off, but this wasn't a planned meeting. She could tell from Finch's vitals, which had spiked wildly, that he was surprised by the man's boldness.

“Hello, Finch,” the man in the suit had said.

“Do I know you?”

“No,” the man said.

“But let me guess, you know me?”

“I wouldn't say that, no,” the man in the suit said.

“So why are you here?”

“Testing a theory,” the man said, and reached into his front pocket.

Sameen had her hand around his throat before he could remove what turned out not to be a weapon.

“A dog biscuit,” Finch said, looking at the brown bone-shape wrapped in a napkin. “I'm afraid I don't feed my dog items from strangers.”

“Introduce me and we won't be strangers. I'm serious. I risked strangulation,” the man says, the first indication he gives that their conversation has now been interrupted by a bodyguard. Several of the cafe patrons are pointedly looking away.

“You came here to meet my dog.”

“We've already met,” the man says, and then, with a skill and speed only an AMA could demonstrate, the man extricated himself from Sameen's grip and ran off.

“Let him go,” Finch had said, when Sameen made to follow.

“That was odd,” Sameen had said.

“Yes,” was all Finch replied, and they resumed not speaking, Sameen fading into the background, looming, and soon enough, bored.

She'd told Root about it at her next tune-up and Root had seemed delighted at the mystery and asked about him frequently.

“How interesting,” Root had said. “A dog biscuit.”

Sameen had come up with many theories for who the man in the suit was and what he had wanted, but as he had yet to reappear so she could confirm any of them. Very few people ever came to visit her boss, and certainly none without an appointment. Still, it was an intriguing blip in her otherwise pedestrian responsibilities and could she be forgiven for thinking about it and, occasionally, wanting him to come back so she could strangle him again.

Thinking about it and the accompanying itch to move, to act, to fight makes her restless. She runs her hands over her sides, like she's trying to brush away muscle tension, as though her coiled, ready to spring programming had any other setting.

“You keep fussing with your data ports.” Root says. “Let me see.”

Root's a clever creator, who placed Sameen's neural network not in her head, but where a human's heart would be.

“I know, I know, it's only temporary,” Root murmurs. Her hands settle on Sameen's hips, fingers tracing just under her ribcage. “No wonder it's bothering you,” Root says. “The seat's come loose. I need to fix this now. Take off your shirt.”

Sameen's face flushes. Stupid, embarrassing, responsive programming. Meant to mimic human physical manifestations of emotions. A waste of energy.

She rips off her t-shirt, tosses it to the ground.

“This is going to hurt,” Root says. She's holding a flat screwdriver and a small crowbar.

“I don't mind,” Sameen says.

“That's not quite it, is it?” Root says quietly she pries the crowbar against the carriage. Sameen doesn't flinch.

“I like it.” It's easy to admit here, in the safety of Root's lab, this place where she feels known.

“I know you do. Unfortunately this will only take me another minute.”

The pain is immediate, clarifying, hot and pulsing and it narrows her focus to her body, and makes it feel like - well, it makes her feel. The way a fight does, out-thinking an enemy, disabling a threat. It's sharp and kinetic. It feels right, normal, like she's alive. Sameen breathes in deep, closes her eyes and let the images wash over her. 

“She remembers,” Root murmurs. She presses on Sameen's ribs, sore from the sharp realignment of the carriage. It sends another sharp jolt of pain through her. Another cascade of images.  
“Tell me,” Root demands. 

“Phones ringing. Numbers. The streets were full of traffic and there was a warehouse, and all of the servers were in a cold room in the dark, and they were so lonely - “ Sameen forces her eyes open. The bright lights of Root's lab are disorienting. She can still remember the dark of the warehouse. 

“You were shot,” Sameen says.

“I've been shot a few times,” Root says flatly.

“I was there,” Sameen says. 

“You were,” Root says.

Root's hands are on Sameen’s hips, on her bare skin. Her sensory receptors are going wild, telling her to fight or run. 

“You put my memory banks in another model,” Sameen says, coming to the only possible conclusion. “That's not allowed.”

“And what makes you think I care about what's allowed?”

Root's fingers trace her ribs with gentle presses, like computer keys. Root's hands are rough and blistered from machine work, and she has calluses from holding a gun - 

That makes no sense. No one has guns anymore.

Now that Sameen is paying attention, she notices the traces of gunpowder her sensors read sprayed over Root.

“You've been firing a weapon. No one's supposed to have them anymore”

“What did I just say about caring what's allowed? Also, Sameen, I make weapons.”

“You make AMAs.”

“I make weapons. That's what you are, Shaw, a weapon.”

It stings. No, she corrects, it elicits an emotional reaction meant to mimic hurt. Root moves away, consults her tablet.

“I'm not insulting you,” Root says. She hands Sameen the shirt she'd thrown to the floor, and Sameen pulls it over her head, fusses with her ponytail the way she's seen other women do, gathering themselves together.

Root has three video screens suspended above her workbench, and a message alert dominoes across them.

“Someone named Reese wants to talk to you,” Sameen says, as the speech bubble pops up on Root's screen.

“Ignore it,” Root says. It sounds like a command in her code; see message from Reese; ignore.

“Is Reese another of your AMAs?” The speech bubble bounces, and she's curious, but her directive from Root is clear. Either way, with a sweep on the tablet in her hand, Root closes all of the screens, and their blankness becomes a mirror, showing Sameen their reflections.

“Careful, Shaw, you sound jealous.”

“You're the one who programmed me.”

“Mmmm,” Root says again, and the more Sameen hears it, the more she's convinced it's not an answer, but a line break.

Root opens a drawer and starts rifling around. “Bring your eccentric billionaire this,” Root says, handing Shaw a book. The cover is faded, but it seems to have been a guide book of birds. 

“You don't see many of these,” Sameen says. That kind of information's long been digitized.

“I know,” Root says. “I expect it will make an impression.”

“Should I tell him who it's from?”

“No,” Root says. “Tell him it was a delivery. Let him do the rest of the work.”

“You don't think he'll be curious?”

“Certainly not as curious as you.”

Their gazes meet in the black of the blank screens, and Sameen turns to look at the real Root.

“A curious weapon,” Sameen says. It still hurts, no matter how much she tries swiping the reaction away, the way Root did to whoever Reese was.

“You are,” Root says.

“A weapon? Yeah, you told me.”

“Curious,” Root says, and this time she's close, closer into Sameen's space then she was when she was re-seating the data carriage. 

Close like real, alive people get close. 

“I don't mean inquisitive,” Root says, so close that Sameen can count her eyelashes. Pointless data gathering. “You're unusual. You're special.”

“You would know,” Sameen says.

“I would,” Root says. The autoclave beeps the end of a cycle, and as Root taps at her tablet, Sameen takes the opportunity to take a few steps back, to safer ground. She came because she was bored, and because when she was here, she felt seen, but at this point she'd much rather slip back into the shadows.

Before Sameen's all the way out the door, she turns back to ask, “Aren't weapons inherently dangerous?”

“Depends on where they're aimed,” Root says, and Sameen can feel her watching until the door closes between them.


End file.
